


Everything changed (but I still love you the same)

by LouIsA_Lesbian



Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Carol and Maria are married, Carol's Mysterious Powers, Established Relationship, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Mentions of Death, Mentions of canon-typical violence, No Actual Death Don't Worry, POV Maria, Post-Canon, Trying to cope with loss and change, Yearning, except on paper, mentions of trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:29:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25426936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LouIsA_Lesbian/pseuds/LouIsA_Lesbian
Summary: Maria watches over Carol while she sleeps and reflects on the ways her wife was irremediably changed, and how she's still the woman she fell in love with.
Relationships: Carol Danvers/Maria Rambeau
Comments: 11
Kudos: 53





	Everything changed (but I still love you the same)

**Author's Note:**

> Hellooo!! It's my first time writing in English and this was not betaed, so it might have grammatical errors but: who cares? I like it like that. I hope you'll enjoy!  
> I'll post some explanations in the end notes so if there are elements you don't understand it might be normal, just check the notes and, if there are still things you don't get, feel free to ask, I'll be happy to answer!

Carol was sleeping.

She was taking just _so_ much space in the bed that it was like her body was trying to soak in the comfort of being finally allowed more movement than on a military-grade mattress. She was lying almost diagonally, hugging the pillow, a leg thrown over it, and her hair was spread behind her. Those days, she wasn’t even bothering with wearing anything to sleep, just keeping her underwear on and a tee-shirt in arm-length if Monica needed anything during the night.

She also didn’t want the curtains closed when sleeping anymore. Maria had once joked about the starlight in her wanting to stay close to the moon and the blonde had laughed, her eyes crinkling like they always used to, but they both knew something so much darker was hiding under this new habit. As such, the moonlight was making her skin shine with an otherworldly glow, accentuating the natural light she seemed to be constantly radiating now.

Sometimes, when she was deep in her dreams, a few sparks of light would come to life; it usually was close to her spasming fingers, but on rare occasions it would manifest close to her feet or, on a memorable one, it even came from her lips. It was never dangerous: Maria had once put her hand close to these sparks and only felt warmth, hot but never so much that it could harm her.

Nowadays, Carol was always running hot, hotter than any person should be.

When she was close to her, Maria was always cold.

She didn’t think she’d one day get over the overwhelming feeling of having Carol back into her life, shattered, with deep memory issues and nightmares, always hesitating between an apparent apathy and plain _too much emotions_ , but back _alive_ and _loving_. No, Maria didn’t think she’d one day wake up and not feel so much joy and disbelief, wake up and not choke while contemplating just how lucky she was with this second chance at happiness.

During the day they could live the perfect life that had been ripped out of their house six years ago. Carol wasn’t remembering things except in flashes, she couldn’t close her eyes and see how their days used to be filled with laughter, joy and affection; she would maybe never remember the way they’d defend each other from men, how their first kissed had the taste of blood from a split lip and the snow cold feeling of a wall being pressed against Maria’s back during a winter night. She could also never come to remember how their hearts had broke the first time Monica had called her “mom”, torn between happiness and the knowledge they would have to teach her not to do it in front of other people.

Carol didn’t remember, but she was _feeling_ : she loved Monica as her daughter, she loved Maria as her wife, she loved their house as her home. They were cooking as they used to, trading herbs, knives and vegetables as proof of their mundane love; they were following the games Monica wanted to play both inside and outside; they were repairing and creating stuff, little trinkets and toys and wooden furniture and cars and tractors and whatever fell into their hands. At night they were tidying, putting everything back into place, doing the dishes, taking care of the plants, accompanying Monica to sleep, shutting the lights off and locking the door.

During the day they were a family, brought close by love and care, by joy and laughter, by hope and by relief. But when night came and Carol and Maria were once again alone, looking at each other, this perfect picture was always shattered in an instant. Sometimes, it was Carol who happened to have this switch flipped; more often than not, it was Maria who was crushed under grief and fear and disbelief. Who was she kidding? Most nights, both of them were drowning in their traumas, swallowed whole by the absurdity that were those thrice-damned six years of absence.

Maria was sitting on the bed, watching her wife-except-on-papers sleep. This night wasn’t a restful one for either of them. She was too tense and anxious to try sleeping and Carol was too deep in her dream-memories to control herself. The tell-tale signs of the beginning of a nightmare where appearing: she was frowning and her lips were pinched, her fingers were lightly spasming and her calves were contracting in the eventuality she’d need to run and fight.

She had learnt different things during all these hours of watching the blonde sleep and fight dreams. One, the energy coursing through her veins and making her glow seemed to need a conscious activation to become deadly and dangerous. Even deep into the hell that was her brainwashed mind, she never shone like she had done on the spaceship. Two, both of her military trainings were written in her body: her reflexes had been honed and perfected until they were written into her every muscle, always guarded and quick to respond to any possible threat. Three, if woken up from a violent nightmare, it would scar her for days, making her jumpy and closed-off. She would run from Monica and Maria and take refuge on the roof, where she’d look at the sky with faraway eyes. After the third time it happened, Maria stopped trying to get her to abandon the depths of her broken mind and resigned herself to keep an eye on her nights.

She was sure Carol knew her wife couldn’t manage to sleep before her first nightmare came and went, but, as they did with so much of their new habits, she didn’t say anything. Maria was keeping watch, observing the twitches and the sparks, cataloguing the jumps of her jaw and the way she was clawing the mattress.

Tonight was going to be one of _these_ nights, where sleep would elude her and terrors would drag the blonde always deeper into the open wound that was her brain.

Maria took a deep breath and slowly lay down, pulling the cover over herself even in the oppressive summer heat. With careful movements, being mindful of Carol’s lightning-fast reflexes and now light-slumber, she came closer to her wife, fingers lightly running up the other’s arm before linking their fingers, getting the nails away from their poor mattress. She plastered herself on her back, intertwining their legs before using her free hand to push the hair away for her neck where she pressed her forehead.

“’a’ia?

\- Hush Starlight, go back to sleep.

\- ‘ov’ ‘u.”

She swallowed, trying to control the ball of raw emotions threatening to make her cry and squeezed her hand, returning the feeling without word. Carol made a pleased sound and immediately fell back asleep, clearly relaxed by her proximity. Maria breathed in to fill her nose of her scent, the embodiment of everything that was and would be, both the same and forever changed.

Carol was finally sleeping, and Maria let herself drift away surrounded by the unmistakable scent of _post-explosion smoke_ , the furnace-hot skin taking all of her warmth and making her feel cold. The blonde would never be a danger to her as long as she was awake and conscious. But if she had to die, maybe dying from hypothermia while protecting her wife from the enemies inside her head wouldn’t be so bad.

_Maybe tomorrow we’ll make maple cookies and eat them under the stars. It’ll go with her smoke._

With this final loving thought, she fell asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is mostly focusing on Carol's powers and how it could impact her everyday life. Because she absorbed all this energy and because she's glowing when she uses it, I imagined that it would dim in her everyday life but, when put in a dark-setting, she would have a soft glow visible for the human eye.  
> With all of this energy, she would also always run very hot, way more than a basic human; but because she /absorbed/ the energy from the first explosion, she might also absorb the energy from the things or people she comes into contact with, leaving them cold.  
> For the draped-in-a-smoke-scent part, I just think it'd be neat.
> 
> Also don't worry, Maria isn't dead at the end of this story! She was letting herself be caught in her melancoly, musing about ife and death and love as I tend to do when 1 AM is passed. She's still mourning and trying to reconcile her life with and without Carol, which makes her think of dark things, but she wakes up in the morning and they bake cookies and go stargazing with her wife and their daughter.
> 
> If you liked it, please leave a kudo or comment to tell me what you thought of it! <3


End file.
